Nigerian scammer openly say they are from Nigeria - but why?

I know that a significant part of Nigerian scammers are indeed working from Nigeria. A scam starts with exchanging messages. Physical contact is not to be expected. It is widely known that scammer often say they are from Nigeria, so often so that the country's name is burned for this purpose. That must be known in Nigeria, at least to scammers.

I would expect that a scammer would pretend to be from a different country. It would make it harder to "prove" that he is indeed from that country. He is in control of the conversation and has many chances to prevent the proof or fake it.

Some of the scammers may be elsewhere and pretend to be in Nigeria only. But "Nigeria" is burned for him also.

So, what prevents a Nigerian scammer from not disclosing the country he works from?

5 Answers
5

They say "Nigerian" because the savvy ones ignore it. So any answers must be from lower risk victims who are more likely to send the money.

There are different types of scams. If you browse through the scam tags, you will find some very sophisticated scams that have quite a bit of hardware as well as people.

In the Nigerian scam, they are looking for really naive people who don't know much about banking or anything and can be easily taken for ride. If they write great emails and camouflage, they will get quite a few responses as at that point people replying don't know its a scam. After a few email exchanges; smart people realize its a scam and walk-off.

For the scammer, he has spent / invested quite a bit of time to reply and the positive hit rate is bad.

So they make it quite obvious its a scam and wait for someone who hasn't heard or knows about it. This way he will get a better hit rate and doesn't have to invest time in responding.

Scammers appear intentionally bad at their first contact in order to weed out people who are too smart.

Sending mass spam emails to random addresses is cheap. But interacting with someone who replies is costly, because it requires a real human to write a custom response. If they interact with marks who are smart enough to become suspicious as soon as they get asked for money, then they are wasting their time. They only want to spend their time on the most gullible marks who never question anything. When one responds to the classic "I am a prince of Nigeria" email, then they obviously have never heard of the advanced fee fraud scam, so they are a potential victim worth spending time on.

And by the way: Not all scammers actually come from the country they claim to come from. 61% of those which get traced are in fact located in the United States. Claiming to come from an exotic location is often part of the ruse.

Obligatory XKCD (CC BY-NC 2.5):

The scammers are targeting those 10,000, as they're easier targets. Calling themselves Nigerian princes is a good way to focus on that audience.

From a cost/payoff perspective, they most definitely do NOT want a James Veitch, a skeptic who replies to scammers and wastes their time thinking they've got a mark when really they don't, and then presents these conversations to audiences as a form of comedy.

I think the most likely answer is the scammer's end goal is to get you to transfer money to a Nigerian bank account. Being somewhat poor and from Nigeria, that's basically what they can get. So they need to be honest about that part upfront so as to not waste time on people who will balk at that part later.

Thank you for your interest in this question.
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